Sale Away

I don’t often talk about business on this blog despite having a dad who works in sales. Yet the topic does fascinate me. It’s a major part of everyday life. Business is an invaluable part of society. Many of the useful and fulfilling things in life would be impossible or at least very difficult to obtain without businesses offering to sell them to us. And everything about a business starts with the sale.

Recently, I watched Walter Bond’s speech at Insperity. Walter Bond is a former NBA player who later went into business and made more money there than he ever did playing basketball. He made several good points about sales and life philosophy in general. Some of his stories were heartwarming, and others were funny. I related to the bad priorities that caused him to do poorly in school. His general tone – his talk of sharks, suckerfish, and parasites – got a chuckle out of me.

But one of the main things that stood out to me was his anecdote about the small businesses he talked to over the years. When he asked them about the basics of a business, he got back in reply all kinds of unsatisfactory answers. “Passion,” said one. “Ethics,” said another. Well, passion and ethics are necessary for business, but only because they are necessary for everything someone does. Those are hardly the basics of good business practice. No, what Walter Bond said was the basics of a business was marketing. If you can’t sell your product, you don’t have a business. Selling in business is like dribbling in basketball. Can you imagine basketball without dribbling? I can’t.

The main thing that Bond tells business owners to sell is not simply their product, a vision, or a promise. He repeatedly gave anecdotes of how different salesmen were able to woo over their customers just by being friendly with them. Being a sweet-talker can go a long way to establishing yourself, even if you are a beginner in the industry.

But the vision is something more than “being sweet.” It’s selling an unmatched experience. I realized this after I watched an episode of the series The Foods That Built America. The episode on pizza focused on the origins of Pizza Hut and Domino’s Pizza, the two biggest pizza fast-food chains on the planet. And yet, neither of their original owners had any experience in the restaurant business. The owners of Pizza Hut and Domino’s Pizza didn’t know how to make a pizza, and they were selling to a customer base that was unfamiliar with pizza. Yet both of these chains were run by people who were expert marketers, and that’s all that mattered in the end.

These companies sold not only pizza but an entire experience. Pizza Hut sold family-friendly cheesy goodness to the entire family. The average Midwestern family would never have tasted pizza before, and Pizza Hut gave them that taste. Domino’s Pizza, meanwhile, was very innovative in its marketing. It first dedicated its business model to delivering pizzas to people’s doorstep, a novel concept for the time. Then, when it seemed like the business would go under, it made the promise to its customers to deliver the pizza in thirty minutes or less. This increased their profit margins manifold. In both cases, making good pizza was only part of the story. The real success these businesses enjoyed came from them being run by good salesmen.

In my everyday life, we might not all be salesmen, but we can use this idea in normal interactions. My father, a great salesman and someone I look up to, taught me valuable lessons on interacting with people. These lessons were based on his experience in sales. The main lesson that he (and by extension, Walter Bond) taught was that people don’t want to simply buy a product. They also want a vision, an ethos, or a promise. This is why good listeners are so important – they care about their interlocutors. And that’s very attractive.